A few days remaining to the holiday, and I came across this distant relative of mine. We sat down for a chat or two and started talking about everything and nothing. Then he dropped the bombshell.
“You know the times have arrived, don’t you?”
“Time for what?”
“You mean you haven’t heard about it?”
“Heard about what?”
“Well, the times when the stars in the sky will fall down has arrived.”
I didn’t have to utter anything. My features threw at him a hundred and one questions.
“Look,” he says. “There is an old prophecy that says the time will arrive when all the stars in the sky will fall down.”
“Fall down on what?
“Fall down on us!”
Not another one. not another doomsday prediction which would lead you to ask yourself “If all these things are predetermined to happen then why the hell should I worry about anything? Hey boy, go out on the town and enjoy yourself!
Really this being a fresh one for my ears, I was taken aback for a few seconds. The stars falling down!? No, that sort of prediction doesn’t come quite often.
Look, if you don’t buckle up and out yourself in a string defensive position everything you hear would turn your whole body into one big ache. You would feel whatever ‘doomsday must’ you’ve been told would happen right there, right that minute. There are so many doomsday scenarios you wish those people would come together and cut down the number to a few, say three or four. It would help us to keep track on each one of them. But what is the difference keeping track or not on something bound to happen whatever you do! (Hey bartender, could you give us another round please!)
Sometimes back a guy who claims to be an insider of circles where most of these doomsday scares ‘originate’ was telling us scaring the daylight out of the innocent has become the newest ‘cash cow.’ “There are those who are turning themselves into overnight millionaires!”
Most of the people who tell you one doomsday scenario after another, barricade themselves behind one belief or another. (And there are so many of them these days!) That is what makes it worrisome. In a country where officially more than ninety percent of the population s aligned to one belief or another, and in a country where there are some of the most ardent and committed believers on earth, the psychological damage on the innocent is clear. We can’t live on predictions and predictions only year in year out.
These should be times for disseminating the messages of hope. Times despite the troubles we have been thought and that still are hovering over our heads we are going to ride out the storm. This is the time when people should be made to believe that with the right attitudes and the right moves our Shangri la is not unreachable.
Then there are the ‘politically motivated’ doomsday predictions. Now, why should I listen to some terribly undercooked politician telling me of some doomsday scenario when he and his buddies don’t have the slightest idea about the realities of the country and its surroundings! While I agree that this country still has more than its share of enemies, enemies who would do anything to see it hit the ground on its knees, I’m not comfortable of this tendency to interpret every happening as it is part of the doomsday super highway.
We just don’t want to listen to politicians who always have the sound of finality over everything. “This is a hopeless country,” they tell you. OK and what will you guys be doing to pluck us out of the hopelessness quagmire? What! You’re still working on it! Then, will you kindly enough cut back on all those doomsday scenarios you are hatching! It is really mind-boggling to even imagine how cruel and how inhumane some of those guys could be!
In times when there is so much uncertainty the last thing you need is those who almost scare you into running to the nearest Black Sea shore. To those barricading behind beliefs, no belief we know of is structured to scare is followers into believing that since the stars would come crashing down and the Final Floods would a carry all of us into where ever it has been predicted. Hope and the conviction no problem is so difficult that it wouldn’t be surpassed is what kept us ticking until now and what we should will keep us moving.
I’m waiting for the next kin or stranger to tell me another of the predictions that seem to be carved in stone somewhere else. And for the guy who told me the stars are going to come crashing down…really
The Ethiopian Herald 10 January 2021